In recent years, a trend has emerged in the networking industry in which Internet Protocol (IP) network elements (NEs) have begun to evolve from highly customized and integrated designs to modular pieces of equipment. NEs appear to external entities as a monolithic piece of network equipment, such as a router, network address translator (NAT), firewall, or load balancer. Internally, however, the NE (such as a router) is composed of numerous logically separated entities that cooperate to provide a given functionality (such as routing).
Two types of network element components are commonly used in a NE: a control element (CE) and multiple forwarding elements (FEs). Control elements typically provide control functionality e.g., routing and signaling protocols. Forwarding elements typically handle data path operations for each packet.
There are several known mechanisms used for exchanging information between control elements and forwarding elements in NEs. Most of these mechanisms are FE and/or interconnect specific. Typically, the exchange of information between an FE and a CE occurs across a single channel carrying both control and configuration messages as well as data packets. Further, the messages tend to be large in size. The NE may also be susceptible to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks in which the network element is flooded with bogus control protocol packets, which saturate the channel established between the FE and the CE.